Iranian Resistance’s annual meeting on June 30, 2018, at Villepinte, north of Paris. Meanwhile, Dozens of senior international dignitaries gathered to support the Iranian resistance movement led by Maryam Rajavi, NCRI’s president-elect. Among them Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Bill Richardson, Bernard Kouchner, Stephen Harper, Ingrid Betancourt, Sid Ahmed Ghozali. Nobody knew that the 100,000-strong gathering was in the crosshair of the mullahs’ terrorism machine since at least a year before.
On the same day, Belgian authorities foiled the terrorist plot by arresting a hit team in Brussels, en route to Villepinte, with a powerful bomb in the trunk of their car to be planted in the gathering. Another terrorist was arrested at the venue. Mrs. Rajavi was the primary target.
The next day, a senior Iranian diplomat in Vienna, Assadollah Assadi, arrested in Germany trying to return to Vienna, from Luxembourg. In Luxembourg, he personally handed over the explosives to the terrorist agents. He was the Intelligence Ministry station chief at the embassy since 2014.
The Supreme National Security Council headed by Hassan Rouhani decided to carry out this major terrorist operation which approved by the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
How did the plot start?
The plot came after the major nationwide anti-regime uprisings in Iran in December 2017 and January 2018 that shook the regime to its foundations. In January 2018, Khamenei had underscored the role of the MEK and its network in leading the uprising.
In October 2018, the French Interior, Foreign and Economy Ministers said in a joint statement “Without any doubt, responsibility falls on the Iranian intelligence ministry… and the deputy minister of Intelligence had ordered it.” In January 2019, the EU placed part of the Iranian intelligence ministry and two of its senior officials on its sanctions list.
In July 2020, a court in Antwerp, Belgium, upheld the federal prosecutor’s indictment against Assadi and his three accomplices. Their trial, the first against an accredited diplomat on terrorist charges, is scheduled for November 27, 2020.
Moreover, reports from the German, Dutch and other European security agencies confirm that Iran regime’s embassies have long been participating actively in terrorism and espionage against the NCRI.
Indeed, an EU Council of Ministers’ declaration issued in April 1997 called for the expulsion of the mullahs’ intelligence agents from Europe.
According to recent media reports investigation has concluded that the terrorist plot was not an individual initiation. But the Iranian regime and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Iranian regime’s diplomat terrorist threatened European countries
Reuters reported on October 9, 2020, that according to a police document, Assadi “warned authorities of possible retaliation by unidentified groups if he is found guilty.”
According to minutes of a March 12 meeting between Assadi and Belgian obtained by Reuters, Assadi told police that armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, as well as in Iran, interested in the outcome of his case. In addition, he told, they would be “watching from the sidelines to see if Belgium would support them or not”.
As a result, It is time for the EU to end its silence on such outrageous threat and hold the Iranian regime accountable for resorting to terrorism in Europe.
